Bree Versus the US Government
by Demiser of D
Summary: Bree Cullen is alive. That isn't important. What *is* important, is that Bree Cullen has been asked to meet with a member of the U.S. government, to discuss matters of national security. Logic ensues.


I wrote this while bored, thinking about the logical reasons behind the Twilight Universe. I've actually put quite a bit of thought into it, and I have a fanfic that's been mostly abandoned that would have eventually gotten to this point, but I figured I might as well throw this up and see what sort of ripples it spreads.

Anyway, enjoy.

* * *

Bree Cullen found herself in the most boring military facility ever. Honestly, it looked just like any other brick building on the Olympic Peninsula. Truth be told, she was a little disappointed. Then again, you could hardly expect the U.S. military to put a giant sign reading "SECRET MILITARY BASE" over their facilities.

"Alright, I'm here," she finally said as she entered the building, "I just want to know how you knew about us. Then I'll do whatever I have to do to get the U.S. Government from ever bothering us again. Understand?" Bree Cullen eyed the room around her carefully; it appeared to be a perfectly normal, empty room.

Sitting across a small black table was an average looking man in a grey suit. He smiled humorlessly. "Before we begin, I have a quick question for you. A group of vampires are approached by a smaller group of vampires. The smaller group is dangerous, but could easily be handled by the larger group if taken together. The smaller group then makes it clear that they mean to attack and destroy a single member of the larger group the moment their backs are turned. The larger group then lets them go without question. The question is-"

Bree cut him off, "Hold up a minute. The whole question is just ridiculous. Why would anyone do that?"

The government agent stared at her for a long moment, before, to Bree's surprise, breaking into relieved laughter, "You have no _idea_ how happy it makes me to hear you say that!"

Bree raised an eyebrow, and the agent quickly continued, "Of _course_ the U.S. Government knows about you...whatever you are. How could we _not ?_ Your species accounts for something like 50% of the homicides in the world, and those are just the ones we know about! Keeping their presence a secret takes a significant portion of our operational budget."

Bree's eyes widened, "I...I hadn't thought it was that bad." Then her eyes narrowed, "Wait, how can you just stand by and let this happen? Let vampires slaughter your people!?"

The agent's eyes also narrowed, "And what, exactly, do you expect us to do about it? Stop you _how, _exactly? Do you have any idea how strong you really are?" He took off his glasses and began to polish them slowly, "Honestly, it just isn't fair. We've been advancing nonstop for two hundred years and we're no closer to being able to kill one of you now than we were two hundred years ago. How strong do you think you are, really?"

"One of my friends estimated she could exert the force of a fully laden cement truck going 60 miles per hour rolling down a steep incline, just by arm-wrestling," Bree said after a moment of thought.

The agent stared at her for a moment, then sat back, watching her with a calculating expression on his face, "Please, think about that statement for a moment. Please, just think about it, scientifically."

Bree looked at him questioningly, but did as he asked. A moment later, her eyes widened, "Wait a minute, that statement doesn't even make any sense! You can't translate force that way at all!"

The agent let out a relieved breath, "Thank god, you can be made to see reason. But think about it; didn't that statement make perfect sense right up until you really thought about it?"

Bree nodded wordlessly, and the agent actually let out a short laugh, "It's true! It's really true! We finally have found a logical vampire!"

He stood up and began to dance what appeared to be a jig, while Bree just watched, nonplussed. Finally she spoke, quietly; "All vampires are logical, agent. The transformation makes us much smarter than any human."

"No!" He said, abruptly coming to a halt, "Not true. Well, true, but not completely accurate. It makes you _smarter_, yes, but at the same time...no. Think about it; have you ever heard about a vampire scientist? A vampire that contributed anything to modern society, to science at _all ?"_

Bree's eyes narrowed again, "Well, there was Nahuel's father, but...honestly, he was a bit crazy, too. And now that I think about it, none of his theories made much sense. And Carlisle's a doctor, but I've never heard of him inventing anything himself, just using techniques discovered by others."

"Exactly!" The agent said, snapping his fingers decisively, "Vampires, as you call them, are smarter, faster, have perfect memories, and live for thousands of years. And yet, in all that time, there has never been a vampire scientist. And think about the everyday lives of vampires, think about it critically; do they seem particularly logical to you? Going to high school over and over again, when it's blatantly obvious that you are learning nothing, that you stand out from the others, and that you are putting everyone there in danger just by existing?"

"That's...but...they..."

"No!" The agent said, snapping his fingers dismissively, "Vampires are so powerful that not even our most powerful weapons can harm them, and yet they are so mind-numbingly _stupid_ sometimes that our best analysts can barely predict their actions!"

"Be careful, agent; not all vampires are as easy-going as I am." Bree said warningly.

He stared at her for a long moment before settling back into his chair with a sigh, "I'm sorry, you're right. But you must understand by excitement at finally meeting a member of your species that we can actually _communicate_ with. Every single one of our agents that we've infected with the vampire hyperfluid has immediately gone rogue and attempted to murder everyone in the vicinity."

Bree raised an eyebrow, "Hyperfluid?"

"You know it as venom. It is not anything of the sort; it appears to be composed of some sort of systematically repeating system of subatomic particles, which shouldn't even be _possible_ according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. And then there's your teeth..."

Bree was glad she was a vampire; otherwise this unstoppable flood of new information might have overwhelmed her long ago. Well, maybe. The intellectual part of her laughed derisively at the thought, but Bree's Overmind wasn't so certain. "Our teeth?" She finally said.

"Yes, your teeth. Did you know that, somehow, your teeth can suddenly become the sharpest cutting object known to mankind? We have dozens of hours of fights between vampires, and the only ways you are able to hurt one another is either through the exertion of _extreme_ levels of force; enough to power cities, you understand, usually accomplished by the complete exertion of your entire bodies...or by a light caress by your teeth. We believe they somehow subvert the gluonic bonds at the base of reality. Either that or they actually cause molecular tears in the space-time continuum, but our scientists _really_ don't want to think about that."

Bree sat still, processing all the new information, before finally shaking her head. She would need to talk with Carlisle and the others before making any real decisions. "In any case, why did you want to meet with me? Other than meeting a 'rational vampire'," she said, making finger quotes.

"Ah, yes, of course." The agent sat back into his chair and folded his arms, "I'm sure you must have realized by this point that vampires cannot have originated on this planet."

Bree's jaw went slack. "_What?"_ she finally managed after several seconds trying to comprehend this statement.

The agent rolled his eyes derisively, "Think about it, Bree; vampires are a species of lifeform that exist on an entirely different level from every other creature on earth. Capable of running hundreds of miles per hour, and even _faster_ if they have to, capable of lifting _hundreds_ of tons single handedly, living for thousands of years? Life might make leaps and bounds in evolution, but that's not a leap, that's the equivalent of going from bacterial life to making a moon landing in a year. It's patently absurd that such a thing could happen on earth."

"...But it did. Haven't you ever heard of the Anthropic Principle?"

The agent stared at her for a long moment, then burst out into laughter, "You sound just like some of the skeptics back at the labs. But even they can't deny the most damning bit of evidence; how do you explain your skin?"

Bree's eyebrows pulled together, surprised at the apparent non-sequitour. "What about it?"

"Well, I'm not sure if you've noticed this, Bree, but..." the agent leaned foreward conspiratorially, and Bree leaned forward as well, confused, as he whispered, "Your skin sparkles in the sun."

Bree stared at the agent blankly.

The agent, on the other hand, grinned and leaned back into his chair. "If you think about it, it explains everything."

"...how?"

He held up a single finger, "Firstly, did you know that sunlight is actually more than ten times brighter than interior light? Eyes automatically adjust so well that we don't even notice, but it is." He held up a second finger, "Therefore, we theorized that vampire skin doesn't sparkle in _sunlight_, but in _high intensity light._ It turns out we were correct. I'll explain further in a moment." He held up a third finger, "So what reason could there possibly be for a creature to evolve skin that only reflects while in the sun? Any sort of sexual selection is automatically out, because vampires cannot breed. So why? Why have such a seemingly useless trait?" He lowered all his fingers and stared blankly at the wall, his mind going back in time to another event; "All the answers became obvious when we tried to kill one of your kind with a high-intensity laser."

Bree let out an outraged sound, and the agent quickly qualified, "Not one of your _family_, just another human-eating vampire. You yourself expected that we should be attempting to kill them."

Bree frowned, but nodded, and the agent continued, "We loaded our most powerful experimental laser onto a Russian Myasishchev VM-T and hit him with the YAL-1 at nearly 400% of it's projected peak capacity. The energy output melted the laser into slag, nearly crippled the aircraft it was mounted on, and discharged nearly fifty of our best top-secret military quality nuclear batteries." He frowned, "It also took the YAL project out of service permanently, but that was more our fault than yours, so I won't hold you to it. But do you know what it did when it hit the vampire?"

Bree raised an eyebrow. Was this a threat? This would be the right time to do it, she supposed, but it seemed an odd statement to make, considering his comments on human weapons earlier. "It burned him to a crisp, I suppose," She said, offhandedly.

He shook his head curtly, "Not even close. That vampire lit up like the fourth of july; several officers observing nearly went blind from the glare, and the nearby area was heated to the point of melting _rock_. But when it was all over, the vampire was completely untouched. His temperature didn't even go up! Not. One. Degree."

The agent leaned forward urgently, "Do you understand what this means? We could understand some sort of accidental refraction happening naturally, but reflection ratios of over 99.9999 percent!?" he was speaking faster now, voice deadly serious, "The _only_ way that could logically happen is if it were _engineered. Designed, Bree!" _He stared at her for a long moment, then sat back again, face once again placid, "That's when we finally realized what was happening. Everything about you suddenly fell into place; a three day incubation time? The constant psychological urge to drink the blood of your own kind? What is obviously _laser armor?_"

He shook his head vehemently, "None of that is an accident. The vampire infection is no simple disease! It is a weapon; the most horrifyingly powerful weapon ever known to mankind. One vampire, working to infect as many as he could, could do so to _thousands_ a day. Thousands, Bree. And after three days, they would start to do the same. In a week you would have a vampiric army a million strong brutally murdering its way across the globe. In a month, the human population of the earth would cease to exist."

For the first time since becoming a vampire, Bree sat perfectly still, utterly stunned.

"_That_ is what we have to deal with, Bree. Not a few murders. Not even a war like anything we've known before. We are talking about the complete annihilation of the human race. And it could happen at any time."


End file.
